Iowa Man Denied New Trial Despite Problems With Witness Reward & Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis

It’s rare that a defendant gets two bites of the apple on appeal based on State misconduct. Glendale More is the exception to the rule. On two separate occasions, he was able to prove that errors were committed in connection with his murder trial. And yet, in both cases, it wasn’t enough to award him a new trial.

According to the recent opinion of the Supreme Court of Iowa in More v. State, 2016 WL 2941112 (Iowa 2016),

A jury convicted Glendale More Jr. of first-degree murder in connection with the death of his girlfriend, Wauneita Townsend….

The case against More came to trial in February 1984. The trial record shows that Wauneita Townsend was found dead in her car in a Davenport auto dealership parking lot on August 28, 1983, at 5:34 p.m. She had been shot twice, including one fatal shot to her head. The car had been set on fire with paint thinner used as an accelerant. Fresh groceries and a shopping receipt time-stamped 4:37 p.m. were found in the trunk of the car. Two bullets were recovered from the crime scene—one from the victim’s head and one that traveled through her body and became embedded in the roof of the car. More’s fingerprints were found on the back hatch of the car and on a pop can in a litter bag inside the car.

Prior to her death, Townsend was in a relationship with More.

At trial, the State

offered the testimony of Jeffrey Elmore, who was thirteen at the time of the crime. On the date of the murder, Elmore had run away from the Quad City Children’s Center, where he was held under an order of the juvenile court. Elmore testified that he was in the auto dealer parking lot contemplating stealing a car. He testified that he heard “two big booms” coming from a white car and saw a man with a limp appear to set fire to the vehicle. He identified the clothing worn by More. He also said that he slipped on some gravel which made a noise and that the person who set fire to the car shined a flashlight under cars looking for him. Elmore testified that the person then placed the flashlight in a ring-type holder attached to his belt or waist. At trial, Elmore identified More as the person who set the fire.

The State, however, failed to disclose that a reward was offered in the case, with Elmore being aware of the reward at the time of his testimony and eventually receiving the reward ($325) after testifying. After learning this fact, More moved for a new trial in 1999, with the Court of Appeals of Iowa concluding

that the State violated Brady by withholding the potentially exculpatory evidence that the State had suggested Elmore might receive a reward in connection with his testimony….The court concluded, however, that More could not show that but for the Brady violation there was a substantial probability the result would have changed.

More recently, More appealed based upon problems that have been identified with comparative bullet lead analysis (CBLA), which was done in his case. Specifically,

With respect to the bullets in More’s case, [Special Agent Roger] Asbury [of the FBI] testified that he took three samples each from three bullets, one removed from Townsend, one removed from the car in which she was found, and the third from the cartridge that the nurse found in More’s pocket. He stated that he found that the three bullets had matching compositions and that it was his opinion that “because of this match, … these items certainly could have originated from the same box of cartridges due to their composition. It would be what I would expect to find among bullets originating from the same box of cartridges.”

The problem with this type of testimony is that a report by the National Research Council of the National Academies (NRC), Forensic Analysis: Weighing Bullet Lead Evidence (2004), “indicated that there could be as many as thirty-five million bullets manufactured from the same batch rather than the 100,000 figure offered by the FBI expert.”

The State tried to downplay the significance of this report, but the Supreme Court of Iowa concluded that

the NRC report is not just another article destined to be piled high on researchers’ desks before being discarded in academic dustbins. The NRC is a blockbuster report on CBLA with new statistical data previously unavailable to scientists. Among other things, the NRC report suggested that there could be thirty-five million bullets with the same CBLA characteristics, thus indicating a large potential risk of false positives. While each marginal advance in science cannot form the basis of a new trial, watershed developments are a different story.

Ultimately, however, the court still concluded that this was harmless error based upon the overwhelming evidence of More’s guilt, concluding that “More certainly had motive, he had the means, he was at the right place at the right time, and his behavior generally and repeatedly points in the direction of guilt.”

-CM